Fixing Delilah (8 page)
XOXO,
Steph
I read a few more entries about Mom’s visit, about Stephanie introducing her sisters to Casey, about her sisters actually
liking
him. And I try to imagine them not as they are now, aged and lost and dead and unknown, but as kids. Still mostly happy. Still looking forward to an entire life together.
I don’t keep a diary, but if I did, I wonder if I’d write about Finn. The way he calls me Lilah. All those times in the woods. Other than that, I don’t have much to say about him—we haven’t even spoken since the night Mom caught me sneaking back into the house just before we left for Red Falls. The story of me and Finn certainly doesn’t warrant an entire diary, but as I flip through the rest of Stephanie’s, I see Casey’s name on nearly every page, spelled out in full on some, just
C
on others. I wonder how long they stayed together. Was he there at the end? At the funeral? What happened to him after?
I slide the diary back into the drawer and crawl into bed, my late aunt’s words a new weight, a new thing to chew and worry and slip in between the layers of my dreams. My mother lost her baby sister. Then her father. Then her mother. She’s not close with Rachel, and I’m not making things better for her either.
Most of the time, I want to hate her. But tonight, I can’t. All I can do is close my eyes and promise the stars twinkling through the windows that I’ll try. That I’ll work with Mom, Rachel, Jack, and Patrick to finish up the house, sell the rest of my grandmother’s things, and get us all back to our regular life.
But as I drift off to sleep with Stephanie’s words rolling like ticker tape through my mind, I wonder if any of us even knows what a regular life
is
.
“I think I’m gonna be sick.” I hold my nose as Patrick kneels in the grass and digs into a moldy pile of leaves and old garden clippings near the front corner of the house. “I’m serious, Patrick. This is foul.”
“I brought you a pair of rubber gloves,” he says, smiling. “Might want to put them on before we get to the
really
nasty stuff.”
“It gets worse?”
“Gloves, Delilah.”
I do as he says, trying hard not to breathe through my nose as I hold open a black outdoor trash bag.
“So, Emily seems really cool,” I say, turning my face away from the mess. “I love that she’s not shy.”
Patrick laughs. “Yeah, she’s definitely not shy.”
“Um, what do you mean, gutter boy?”
He laughs. “Not
that
. She’s just really outgoing, that’s all. I met her last year while her family was staying with Luna for a few weeks. This year, her parents sent her alone to work with Luna for the whole summer. She wants to own her own café one day.”
“I know. That’s awesome. I would love to have just one single thing in my life figured out like that. I break into hives whenever someone even mentions SATs.”
Patrick stands and ties off the first bag, tossing it alongside the house. “I know what you mean. I don’t even want to
think
about the future.”
“Aren’t you going to work with your dad? Reese and Son?”
He shakes his head. “Dad and I… he’s really into the whole ‘and son’ thing. Don’t get me wrong—I enjoy the work and the money’s great and Dad and I are pretty close, so I always have a good time working on projects with him. But this stuff isn’t where my heart is.”
I follow him to the back of the house where he’s already set up two ladders and a garden hose. “Where is it?”
“Music,” he says as we climb our respective ladders. “It’s all there is for me. I think about notes and scales and lyrics, even in my sleep. I see something like the lake in the winter or the Brooklyn Bridge lit up when no one’s around or seeing you again after all these years, and I want to write a song about it. To find the melody that tells that story, you know? And then I wake up in the middle of the night, just because I can’t stop thinking about it, like whatever is inside wants to come out, and I know I just
have
to do it, no matter what anyone says or how it shakes out with my dad.”
“Wow.”
“I want to perform,” he says, running a gloved hand through the gutter above the back windows. “And I want to teach.”
“Patrick, I can totally picture it. You’ll be incredible.”
He drops a pile of leaves to the ground and reaches in for another handful as I do the same. “You think so?” he asks.
“Without a doubt. So why don’t you just explain it to your father? If he knew you were so into music, I’m sure he’d support you. No?”
“Well…
no.
Not only is he stuck on this partnership thing, but he has
major
issues with artists and musicians. Mom basically left him for her acting. Seriously. It’s like this unspoken rule in our house—I never ask him to come to the Luna’s gigs, and I never talk about Mom’s shows. He’s still not over her, Delilah. I don’t think he’ll ever move on. I know my dad always looks like he’s smiling, but on the inside, it’s like his life was frozen on the day she left. He doesn’t know how to unfreeze it.”
I think about Patrick’s father and it reminds me of Stephanie, the words of her life captured and frozen in the pages of the diary the way Jack’s life is frozen here, waiting for a wife who will never return—a life that will never pick up where it left off.
“I have to tell him soon,” Patrick continues. “I promised Mom I’d do it this summer. I’m already enrolled at a school in Manhattan. I start in the fall. He has no idea. And every time I work up the nerve, I see his face and his smile and I think about when Mom left and how heartbroken he was, and then I just close my mouth and pick up the hammer and keep on banging away.”
Beneath my bright yellow rubber glove, a spider crawls out from the gutter onto the roof, disappearing under the eaves as I climb back down to solid ground. “I know that face,” I say. “I see it on my mother whenever I want to talk about anything. She and I used to be really close. But now, it’s like she’s constantly running. She runs to work. Runs from one meeting to the next. Runs to client sites. She’s been doing it for so long that it just comes naturally now. She runs away from me and I’m her own daughter.”
“My mom’s not around much either,” he says, bagging up the leaves on the ground. “Lots of auditions. Any one of them could be ‘the big break.’ Everyone thinks it’s so awesome that I have all this freedom, but honestly, it kind of sucks. I’d rather have my mom around once in a while to bake cookies or bitch at me to turn down the music.”
I nod. “Exactly. But in the meantime, she’s not. And I’m supposed to be figuring out my life and I have no idea where to start. I’ll probably end up like her. Get a desk job. Hang up a few motivational posters. Become a responsible corporate citizen-slash-zombie. Gross, right?”
“Ah, I can’t see you in a job like that,” he says. “There’s too much life in you. That kind of gig would suck it right out of you, and then I’d have to go kill someone, and then you’d spend the rest of your days trying to bust me out of jail.”
“Um, as promising and well-thought-out as
that
sounds… got any other ideas?”
Patrick laughs.
“What’s so funny?”
“I have one idea,” he says, shaking his head. “But your mother would
definitely
not approve.”
“Well, what is it?”
“You don’t want to know.” He laughs again. I pick up the hose, squeeze the trigger, and douse him.
“No more laughing, gutter boy,” I warn. Soon we’re both covered in a thick, grimy paste of water and dirt and stuck-on leaf parts, mud masks cracking around our eyes and mouths. When this most horrendous project is complete, Mom grants me official permission to go to Luna’s for Patrick’s show, saving me the effort of an elaborate window escape. When she sees us up close, two swampy creatures from the depths of Red Falls Lake, her smile is broad and deep, like the time when I set off that fire extinguisher in Connecticut.
* * *
De-guttered and pink after a hot shower, I slather myself with Rachel’s homemade vanilla sugar body butter and wrap up in Mom’s summer robe. It smells like her—Coco Chanel. The first time she bought a bottle was after she landed a full-time marketing manager gig at DKI, complete with a 30 percent salary hike. We went to the Chocolate Bar to make dinner out of our desserts, and right after the double fudge mousse and hand-dipped white chocolate strawberries, we headed to Four Corners Mall so she could splurge on us. I got an iPod and she got the perfume, and for that whole first year, Coco was the smell of celebration. Of success. Of happiness. She was still around back then, taking me school clothes shopping, watching movies with me, baking cookies, bitching about loud music, just like Patrick said. And she smelled great doing it.
Now, several promotions later, buying a new bottle of perfume is just another errand on her assistant’s long list, and Coco Chanel is the smell of nothing but a woman leaving; a door clicked closed after a casual “Don’t wait up—I’ll probably be late again tonight.”
“Hey, you,” Rachel calls from the porch. “Come sit with me.”
I join her outside, rocking the porch swing with my foot, lavender aromatherapy candles floating in a bowl of water nearby.
“Where’s Mom?” I ask. “I thought she was done for the day.”
“Nope,” she says. “Had another meeting. She’s in her bedroom.”
“Of course.”
“It’s okay, Delilah. Really. She’s done a lot with the estate already. It’s going much better than I thought.”
“But you’re upset.”
“Just… pensive,” she says, tucking her legs beneath her. “I pulled the nostalgia card again today. Then I found these old pie tins in the basement. The cheap kind you’re supposed to throw out after, you know? And I had this memory of picking blueberries with Mom… I must have been ten or twelve. We spent the whole day together, just the two of us. The berries were everywhere, so sweet and warm from the sun, and we ate them straight from the bushels. Later we baked a pie and ate most of it while it was scorching hot out of the oven, hours before anyone else got home. Amazing what we think we’ve forgotten, huh? All that from a hunk of tinfoil.”
“I know what you mean,” I say, my thoughts floating back to the red cardinal and the four-leaf clovers.
“There’s a lot of research on scent and memory, too,” Rachel says. “I read this article… some scientists think that odor is a more powerful emotional trigger than visual cues like photos. I believe it. That’s how I am with real maple syrup. One whiff, and I’m right back here again, right back to the days when Mom used to make her own maple sugar candy.”
I close my eyes and pull my wrists to my face, breathing in the cuffs of Mom’s robe.
Don’t wait up—I’ll probably be late again…
From an open window, the electronic warble of the printer-scanner–fax machine pierces the air. Rachel and I listen as Mom comes downstairs, retrieving and reading her fax aloud for the caller on the other end of her earpiece. Muffled by the papery rustling of maple leaves in the breeze, her words blur into a series of indiscernible sounds, chopped and broken but urgent as always.
As Aunt Rachel tells me about the junk she uncovered in the basement—used gift wrap, refolded and stored; unopened shampoos and conditioners undoubtedly bought in bulk; board games from her childhood—my own broken recollections of my grandparents mesh with hers, our voices entwined in a thick, slow-cooked stew of memories and events and scents and sayings. Pictures of Nana come more clearly now, aided by Rachel’s vivid descriptions of her mother’s cooking and clothes and habits and all the little things that make each of us who we are. If Mom can hear us, she doesn’t make it known, busying herself instead with the constant shuffling and reshuffling of paperwork.
“I wish Mom would talk about this stuff,” I say. “I know she wants to block it all out, but I don’t. I want to know about Nana. I want to know what happened.”
Rachel closes her eyes and inhales the air over the candles. “Del, our mother said a lot of hurtful things at Dad’s funeral. Things that can’t be unsaid. And now that she’s gone, we’ll never resolve it. It’s like everything from that time in our lives is just… I don’t know. Frozen, right where we left it.”
Frozen, just like Jack in the house next door. Just like Stephanie on the pages of her white diary.
I don’t want to believe my aunt, because believing her means believing that my relationship with Mom could become irreparable. That I might never be able to work things out at school. That nothing is ever truly fixable.
“Bad things happen,” I say. “But why does it have to erase all the good? You and Mom used to be close. Same with me and Mom. I don’t know how everything got broken.”
She looks at me for a long while, but Mom is in the kitchen doorway now, a five-minute break between meetings, asking if anyone wants a snack.
“No thanks,” I say, more to Aunt Rachel than to Mom. “I need to get dressed, then I’m heading to Luna’s. See you later?”
“We have an appointment with the estate lawyer tonight,” Mom says, “but I expect you back by ten, got it?”
“Got it.”
The screen door bangs closed behind me, and through it I hear the familiar rasp of whispered accusations. Low voices mingle and clash, and I quickly dress, slipping out the front door before the Hannaford tide sucks me into its raging undertow.
Luna’s—along with Crasner’s Foo nasty and the rest of the Main Street stretch that we drove through on our first day—is just a ten-minute walk from Nana’s house. The sun is still out, it’s not too hot, and for the first time since our arrival, the anticipation of something good buoys me above the dark waters of all else.
Walking through the café doors is like stepping into one of Rachel’s tarot books. The walls are painted in dark purple and fuchsia, accented with swags of velvet and sparkly silver moons and stars. The smell of fresh coffee and cinnamon wafts over the mismatched furniture as tourists sip their cappuccinos, floating like rafts in the easy laughter of summer vacation.
“Hey, Delilah,” Em calls from behind the counter. “Perfect timing. Patrick’s about to be harassed by his fan club.” She nods toward a honey-haired, C-cup Jezebel seated at a nearby table. “This oughta be good. Watch.”
Patrick sees me and smiles, but before he can cross the room, Jezebel tackles him in some sort of Oh, How I’ve Missed You embrace, and that stupid butterfly bangs into my ribs with a limp wing.
Patrick blushes as he struggles to break free of her lingering and somewhat annoying (to the average onlooker who might care, which, for the record, I don’t, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s annoying) hug. When he finally succeeds, she looks at him with big cartoon eyes and promises to be back for his show. Then she chews on the straw of her frozen coffee drink and says good-bye with another hug, only instead of using the word
good-bye
like a normal person, she says, “Ta!”
Ta?
When she finally makes her exit, it’s a grand show, Jezebel walking so slowly that it’s impossible
not
to notice the glittered
HOTTIE
printed across the ass of her pale pink shorts.
“So you have a fan club?” I tease Patrick when she’s finally gone.
“You say fan club, I say stalker.”
“Right. It must be tough having beautiful girls throw themselves at you like that,” I say. “Poor thing.”
“Yes, they’re just throwing themselves, aren’t they? You should see the collection of lace thongs and hotel room keys I have at home.”
I know he’s kidding, but it gets under my skin. I try to think of him as Little Ricky with braces and freckles, but that only strengthens the invisible pull I feel toward him, the sense of entitlement rising in me as though knowing his past gives me some claim to his future, some connecting string between now and the days we played hide-and-seek under the willows when his parents were fighting and he didn’t want to go home.
“I’m sure the older women love you, too,” I say.
“There
are
a lot of them, huh?” Patrick laughs, twisting his coffee cup inside its eighty-percent-post-consumer-recycled heat sleeve.
“Red Falls wasn’t crowded like this when we were kids,” I say.
“We didn’t have Luna’s. There wasn’t anything to do here but watch the boat races and eat maple sugar candy.”
“I wonder what they’ll finally do with Nana’s house?” I ask, thinking of the new cottages Patrick pointed out across the lake.
“Probably turn it into a hotel for rich people who think ‘rustic’ means you have to wipe your own—”
“Hey, those rich people come out to see your shows, right?”
“Good point. I guess I should be a little more humble. Emily! Another coffee?” he shouts across the counter, waving his empty cup. Em gives him the finger. I think I might love her.
“Humble,” I say. “Good start.”
Patrick needs to finish setting up for the gig, so I find an open computer on the back wall, checking my e-mail for the first time since we left Key.
There are no messages.
I torment myself instead by clicking on Libby Dunbar’s e-mail about the blog pictures on the “Free-4-All Graffiti Wall,” trying to think of a decent response.
Delilah, I’m not censoring anyone. I really thought you of all people would know how important freedom of the press is. Your father died defending it.
When I read Libby’s message now, I realize that most of the anger I’d been harboring over the photo situation is gone, a tiny sailboat tossed on the waves of way more important things. Why respond at all? That stuff about my father… she’ll never get it. She’ll never understand the embarrassment of parent-teacher conference night when my mother asks to do hers over the phone. She’ll never know the sinking feeling of seeing my report card—back when it was still decent—unopened on the counter for weeks.
“You’re lucky,” my friends used to say. “No one bugs you about grades and homework. My father is all over me about that crap.”
No, my father never bugged me about grades or homework. He never scolded me for accidentally stealing lipstick or denting the car or sneaking out with Finn. But I still look at his picture at the top of all of his online news articles, tracing the deep lines in his face and imagining that I put them there, even now, all these years after his death.
I sign out of my e-mail and Google Thomas Devlin again, but it’s the same old list of links and articles, memorializing him for all eternity in little blue letters on a bright white background.
Frozen.
“I just finished my shift,” Emily says when I grab my iced latte and meet her back at the counter. “Let’s find a table before they call me back in.”
The café is filling up, but Em and I find a spot right in front of the stage just as Patrick starts the sound check. Emily tells me more about her family—about moving to Vermont from New Hampshire a few years ago, her little brother in middle school whom she loves even when he’s driving her nuts, her parents sending her up to Red Falls for the summer. She asks me about school and my family and what I do for fun back home, picking up the conversation where we left off at the house the other day. I tell her about Mom working a lot, just like she’s doing at the lake house. I tell her that my dad died before I was born, but I keep the conversation light. Flowing. Moving on before the seeds of curiosity about my father’s death take root.
At a round table not far from the stage, an older guy sits with two kids waiting for the show to start. He laughs with them and points at invisible things outside so he can sneak bites from the pastries on their plates.
Usually, I don’t miss my father. But times like this, I wonder. I play those pointless games—What If and Maybe. What if the
National Post
didn’t give him that assignment? Mom wouldn’t have had to raise me alone. Maybe she wouldn’t have gone to work full-time. Maybe she wouldn’t be unhappy. What if Mom could’ve had with Thomas what Stephanie had with Casey? What if they got married? Maybe he’d be here with us now, helping Mom and Rachel with the estate, or sitting here at Luna’s, giving us a brief history of the British Invasion as we await Patrick’s performance.
“Wait till you hear him,” Emily says as Patrick plugs in another amp. “He’s amazing. I’m not just saying that because we get better tips on show nights, either.”
I stir the slush of my drink with a straw. “I can’t wait,” I say. “It’s so funny to see him up there.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
“The last time I saw Patrick before this summer, we were jumping off bleachers and rolling down the hill to make ourselves dizzy. Everything’s
so
different now. In a good way, I mean. It’s cool.”
“Definitely,” she says. “He’s been practicing all week for you. But as usual, I didn’t tell you that.” She smiles.
“What do you—”
“How you all doin’ tonight, Red Falls?” Patrick’s opening chords interrupt, alighting the Luna’s crowd in a blaze of cheers and whistles. I wave away the question and sit forward in my chair, ready to clap and cheer and join in on the big Red Falls welcome as Patrick dives into the first song.
And oh my
God
.
Patrick can
sing
.
I don’t mean
la-la-la
sing. I mean,
sing
sing. Goose-bumps, holding-our-breath, lumps-in-our-throats, tears-in-our-eyes, all-we-need-is-
love
kind of sing.
He belts it straight out, his voice like milk and honey and everything rich and warm and good. I want to drink it. To take off my clothes and slip into his music like a hot bubble bath. One song leads into the next, graceful, flawless, Patrick holding back just enough to build up the anticipation in us, thick and heavy and stretching into every corner and shadow. Luna’s is packed, all of us singing along as we learn the words, hands and fists and coffee cups pumping in the air, chanting and whooping and clapping with every note. Jezebel the stalker-slash-fan-club-president is back again as promised, right next to the stage, whistling and cheering in a sequined halter top with no bra, watching him as her girlfriends snap pictures with their cell phones, and I don’t even hate her anymore, because now, I
get
it.
Patrick’s voice finds its way through the crowd, over the cheers and the hum of his guitar, right into me, right down through my feet. He’s beaming and crazy and so natural up there. He was
made
for this, the way some people are made for motherhood or medicine or art. In his face, there is nothing but music and life and the radiant light of camera flashes as the whole crowd claps for him. When he winks at me during the last song, watching me through it all, it’s like he’s let me in on a precious secret, mine and his, and I’ll never forget it. I’ll never give it up, not even if another eight or eighty or eight hundred years pass before I see him again.
“Okay, when you told me you could sing, you didn’t tell me you could
sing
.” I shake my head, eyes feeling big inside of it as we walk toward Maple Terrace after the show. “Not like
that
.”
“Thank you,” he says. “I’m glad you were there.”
“Patrick, I mean it. You’re amazing.”
“I know you do. And thank you. I mean that, too.” He smiles, stopping beneath the moon at the end of our street and turning to face me. “I’m glad you’re back. I’m…”
He lets his thought fade as his eyes sweep over mine, down to my mouth. His hands cup my face, and the ground—in the sneaky way that grounds have—drops from beneath my feet. I can’t hear anything but the sound of my own breath, needy and hot and a little suffocated. I feel my body pulling to him, everything uttered between us building to this, magnets on the fridge, and I don’t consider the possible complications, because his eyes are right now on my face, closing, eyelashes casting half-moon shadows on his skin, and—
Bzzzz.
“Oh!” My phone vibrates in my pocket. “It’s me. Sorry! It’s my phone.”
Let it go, Delilah.
“I should get it.”
Are you serious?
“Just because, I don’t know, it might be important. Or something.”
Oh my God! You’re just like your mother! Stop! Stop now!
“One second.” I ignore the succession of voices in my head and flip open my phone without checking the caller ID. “Hello?”
“Lilah.”
“Heyyy…” It’s a breath more than a word, everything in me rushing out on a feather of a sigh.
“What’s up?” Finn asks. It’s the first I’ve heard from him since I left Key.
“Just… out for coffee. This place near where we’re staying. You got my text about Vermont, right?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Sucks that you’re all alone in the middle of nowhere, huh? I could be good in this situation.”
“I’ll be okay.” I try to ignore the guilt bubbling in my stomach because Patrick and I aren’t even together and Finn’s not my boyfriend, so why should I feel bad for talking to him? “How are you?”
“Wishing you were here,” Finn says. “Seven Mile is just a creek without you.”
“I think we’ll be here pretty much all summer. My grandmother died. There’s a lot of stuff to take care of.”
Here’s the part where you say, “Delilah, I’m so sorry to hear that. How are you handling everything?”
“Shit, seriously? Well, just call me when you get back, okay? I just wanted to say hi. I gotta jet. Party tonight. You know how it is.”
“Um, yeah. Sure. I—”
But the conversation is over. “Bye,” I say into dead air. I snap the phone closed and slip it into my pocket. Patrick doesn’t ask about the call, or try to pick up the threads of where we left off. It’s like he’s a different person now, like five minutes ago someone else possessed him and left and now the magic is gone and here we are.
I don’t say anything as we continue our walk home. I just keep smiling at Patrick and shaking my head and mumbling words like
amazing
and
unbelievable
over and over, and he laughs and puts his arm around me and makes me promise I’ll come to Luna’s and cheer for him always, for as long as he has a guitar and I’m here in Red Falls.
“I promise,” I say, waving when I reach the door of the lake house. He waves back, turning up the path to the blue-and-white Victorian.
